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Each week a small segment of Vernon County history is published in the county papers.
For the week of 10/11/2026
by Kristen Parrott, curator
Dudley, Lepke, Clawson, Baker, Enterprise, Oak Ridge, Cliffside, Valleyview. Do you recognize these names?
They were all names of country schools located in the northwestern part of Vernon County. Our region was once dotted with little country schoolhouses. For about 100 years, from the 1860’s to the 1960’s, the country school was an important part of life in this rural area. Today almost all of the country schools have closed, but often the old buildings are still standing.
Our 6th annual country schoolhouse road tour will be held on Saturday, October 24. This year’s tour covers northwestern Vernon County, including the schools named above plus many more. The self-guided driving tour will lead you past remaining schoolhouses, and past the sites of schools that are now gone.
Start your tour between 9AM and 1PM on October 24 at the historic Seas Branch School, located next to Westby Elementary School at 122 Nelson St. in Westby. For $10, you can pick up the guidebook and map, and then drive along a beautiful route full of fall colors through the Towns of Christiana, Coon, Hamburg, Bergen, Harmony, and Jefferson. The individual sites will be marked with little red schoolhouse signs, which will stay up until Sunday evening.
The Seas Branch School will be open for touring inside that Saturday. The schoolhouse was originally located east of Hwy. Y in the Town of Viroqua. It was near the village of Avalanche, along the Seas Branch of the West Fork of the Kickapoo River. The school was built in 1908 and operated until 1958. After it closed, the building was used for a time by the Seas Branch Smithies 4-H Club. Then in 1998, it was moved to the Westby Area Schools property and restored.
The tour will include about 20 schools. Check out our website or call us at 608-637-7396 for more information.
Baker School, Town of Harmony, will be on this year’s country schoolhouse tour.
Pictured here are the schoolchildren in 1941 with teacher Julia Sund.
For the week of 10/4/2026
by Kristen Parrott, curator
Thank you to everyone who came to our guided walk at the Vernon County Cemetery! We had a great turn-out on a grey and drizzly day. We did record the speakers, and we will be posting the recording on our YouTube channel soon. You can also watch videos of other recent events there, such as the program about the Wisconsin State School, and the class about military genealogy.
If you would like to learn more about the Vernon County Cemetery, and the County Home that it was attached to, come to the Vernon County Museum and History Center to see what we have. An exhibit on the first floor of the museum provides a good overview of the county home, with a history of each institution and aerial photographs that show all the associated buildings and land.
Also be sure to look through the materials in our archives. We have a file box containing information about the county institutions, originally called the alms house and the asylum, including photographs and annual reports. And we have created a notebook that focuses more on the people who lived or worked at the institutions, where we collect census and obituary data.
We spent about six months doing research for this cemetery walk, and the result is several new resources, including various lists of the asylum and poor farm staff with job titles and dates of service. As always, this is a “work in progress” that will be updated as we gain new information, so be sure to let us know about your own stories.
October is American Archives Month, and a great time to focus on the records, postcards, maps, newspaper articles, etc., that help us to create programs like the cemetery walk. The history center has a wonderful archives that is especially robust in the areas of Vernon County communities, organizations, and people. It covers a wide variety of topics, from agriculture to ethnic history to military history to transportation, all with a focus on Vernon County.
Fall hours continue this month and next at the museum and history center. Throughout October and November, we are open Monday through Friday, 11AM to 4PM, or by appointment.
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